12 people who brought about Brexit

LONDON — No one expected it, and not many people planned for it, but Britain is leaving the European Union.

Already, it feels like this political convulsion was somehow inevitable, the product of great rumbling tensions and resentments that could not help but find expression.

But the truth is that, with only four points between Leave and Remain, this was a campaign that could so easily have gone the other way. Here are the people who most deserve the credit — or the blame — for the way the referendum turned out.

Dominic Cummings

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Before joining Vote Leave as its campaign director, Dominic Cummings spent months doing detailed research into the public’s attitudes to the EU. He developed a narrow set of messages, which he deployed with brutal efficiency. It was Cummings who changed the Brexit campaign’s slogan from the wishy-washy “Vote Leave, Get Change” to “Vote Leave, Take Control,” and ensured those two words were endlessly repeated by its spokespeople. The (false) figure of £350 million a week being sent to the EU, the warnings about Turkey’s EU accession, the promises to save the NHS — all were crafted to cut through the noise, and did. The former special adviser to Michael Gove was also vital in bringing his old boss on board and attracting Boris Johnson to the cause, giving the Leave campaign the mainstream respectability it needed.

Boris Johnson

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Without Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, there would have been no Brexit. While Gove emerged as a powerful and articulate voice for Brexit, and provided the intellectual heart of the campaign, it was his fellow Tory cabinet minister who really turned the tide. Johnson’s announcement he was jumping ship to Leave caused the pound to slump — and with good reason. As a journalist in the 1990s, Johnson was instrumental in making the EU an object not just of fear but of mockery, with his stories about bumbling bureaucrats and bendy bananas. As a campaigner, he put a cheerful, optimistic face on Brexit — and made it much harder for Remain to label the Leave side as a bunch of backward-looking xenophobes, as they did in the first EU referendum in 1975. Johnson will surely seize the spoils of victory by succeeding David Cameron as prime minister.

Nigel Farage

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Without Nigel Farage, there would have been no referendum in the first place. UKIP’s leader — and in particular his drumming up of concern over immigration — put the Tories, and David Cameron, under irresistible pressure back in 2013. During the referendum itself, some senior figures associated with the Leave campaign came to view Farage as a liability rather than an asset, not least over his role in the in-fighting between Euroskeptic movements and the notorious “Breaking Point” poster with its echoes of Nazi propaganda. But the UKIP leader did what he was supposed to do: motivate and turn out the third of the voters who shared his implacable hostility to the EU and his alarm over excessive immigration. When UKIP was founded in 1993, Brexit was a crankish obsession. Over the last 20 years, Farage has done more than anyone to turn it into reality.

David Cameron

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He called the referendum, he fought it with all his heart, and he lost it. Cameron deserves full credit for the passion with which he pressed his case, given that he could have stood back from the fray in the name of party unity. But his renegotiation deal fell short of what he had promised, his strategy to frighten the public with prophecies of economic doom backfired, and it turned out that he couldn’t speak persuasively to the voters who ended up determining the result. Cameron should have been the Remain campaign’s greatest asset — but the more he warned of the dangers of leaving the EU, the lower his ratings fell. The “essay crisis prime minister,” who made a habit of pulling unexpected victories out of the bag, failed this historic test. His departure was unfortunate, but had the feeling of inevitability.

Jeremy Corbyn

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Remain lost because Labour voters turned out for Leave. In part, this happened because, while the Labour Party wanted to stay In, its leader obviously wanted to get Out. Focus groups were clear that voters had picked up on Corbyn’s ambivalence towards the EU, and that his pro-Remain speeches sounded more like hostage videos than rallying calls. Of course, it turned out that Labour’s voters were equally skeptical — but thanks to Corbyn’s ambivalence, the party’s Europhile MPs and activists could not persuade them otherwise. The argument that Brexit was a right-wing conspiracy was just waiting to be made. Instead voters got the impression the party was divided, or just didn’t care very much. A special mention here too for the near-invisible Alan Johnson, the leader of campaign group Labour In, whose performance is best described, to use a Trump-ism, as “low-energy.”

Angela Merkel

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The German chancellor probably did the right thing by refusing to intrude in the campaign — and keeping other European leaders from doing so. But it is now clear that she and others did not take the threat of a British exit seriously enough. In particular, the renegotiation deal Brussels and Berlin saw as the maximum they could give to the U.K. was less than the minimum Britain could accept. As a result, Cameron could not credibly present the renegotiation as a deal for a “reformed” Europe, and it was never mentioned on the campaign trail. In particular, the deal failed to offer any convincing restrictions on immigration — leaving Remain spokespeople gasping like fish when the issue was raised. Leave campaigners say a proper offer of “associate membership” would have killed their chances dead. Merkel and Cameron gambled that amendments to the status quo would be enough. They weren’t.

Paul Dacre

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They say the printed press has had its day. But as at the 2015 general election, it turns out that having the British tabloids on your side is still pretty important. In particular, the drumbeat of pro-Leave, anti-Remain stories and editorials in the Mail, edited by Paul Dacre, and the Sun, edited by former Telegraph boss Tony Gallagher, was absolutely crucial in setting the media agenda. The dividing lines in this referendum were age and class — and the Mail’s older voters and the Sun’s working-class ones were the constituencies that Leave really needed to turn out (though the support of the Telegraph, Express and Sunday Times was more than welcome too). Insiders credit Paul Stephenson, Vote Leave’s communications chief, for doing much to keep Fleet Street on their side, and coming up with a steady stream of stories for the Euroskeptic press.

George Osborne

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As architect of “Project Fear,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer recruited the governor of the Bank of England, the head of the International Monetary Fund and every other expert he could find to warn of the apocalyptic consequences of leaving the EU — not to mention enlisting the aid of the Civil Service, which spent more (£9.3 million) on a pro-Remain “information leaflet” sent to every household than either campaign was allowed to spend during the referendum period itself. But was the bombardment too much, too soon? When voters failed to heed the warnings, Remain simply turned up the volume — there was nothing else left in the tank. An alternative strategy that could have been effective would be to label the Leave campaign as Tory zealots with a secret agenda to push Britain to the Right. Yet the close involvement of Osborne and Downing Street press chief Craig Oliver in the Remain campaign, and their concerns about Tory unity post-referendum, meant that this line was never pursued with vigor.

Matthew Elliott

Twitter.com/matthew_elliott

The chief executive of Vote Leave took a back seat to his more flamboyant colleagues, but his organizational savvy and experience were crucial to assembling the Leave campaign. In particular, Elliott’s partnership with Cummings proved formidably effective. The founder of the right-wing TaxPayers’ Alliance knew a thing or two about winning referendums: He was behind the landslide defeat of the Alternative Vote in 2011. At Vote Leave’s precursor, Business for Britain, he forged the relationships with fundraisers and entrepreneurs that gave the group resources and respectability. As CEO of Vote Leave he recruited and managed an A-list team of campaigners, giving Cummings the freedom to run the campaign and smoothing any feathers he ruffled. He was also crucial in securing what business endorsements the Leave camp did receive, for example from the industrialist James Dyson.

Will Straw

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It’s unfair to pick on Will Straw, the head of pro-Remain group Britain Stronger In Europe: Despite his managerial inexperience, insiders speak admiringly of his ability to keep the peace between the campaign’s different factions, and of his work with strategy chief Ryan Coetzee. But the contrast with the Leave campaign is telling. Vote Leave had Elliott for polish and Cummings for punch — the smooth man and the hairy man. In Straw, Stronger In just had the smooth man, a fresh-faced policy wonk rather than the kind of bruiser who could knock heads together in the way that Australian pollster Lynton Crosby did when running the Tory general election campaign in 2015. Straw is a nice guy — and finished last.

Roland Rudd

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The founder of PR firm Finsbury has long stood — alongside his close friend Peter Mandelson — at the head of Britain’s small band of genuine, unquestioning Europhiles. As chairman of Business for a New Europe and treasurer of Stronger In, Rudd lined up the City behind the Remain campaign. But he also personifies the philosophical gulf between the financial and political elites and the uncultured voters who actually made the decision. One source commented that with Rudd, Mandelson and Osborne working hand-in-glove, the Remain team resembled the guest list for a dinner party on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht. The result, as one exasperated pro-European Tory put it when privately predicting a Leave vote, was a campaign built to speak to Davos, not Daventry.

Daniel Hannan

European Parliament

The three people who did most to win the campaign for Leave, claims one senior Euroskeptic, were Elliott, Cummings — and Daniel Hannan. The irrepressible, Shakespeare-quoting MEP (a former colleague of mine at the Daily Telegraph) campaigned up and down the length of the country, and knitted together the various factions within Vote Leave, providing cover for Elliott and Cummings to do their jobs. More than that, Hannan and his comrade-in-arms Douglas Carswell were part of the hard core who kept the flame of Tory Euroskepticism burning — and tirelessly promoted their own positive, internationalist case for Britain’s exit from the EU in parallel to Farage’s negative, isolationist one. The fact that Brexit became an orthodoxy among Conservative activists, and many of the party’s officials, owes much to Hannan’s proselytizing work — and to the success he and others had in presenting Brexit as the inevitable fulfillment of Margaret Thatcher’s vision.

“But he also personifies the philosophical gulf between the financial and political elites and the uncultured voters who actually made the decision.” The latter half of that sentence defines why Remain lost. Try and blame Jeremy Corbyn all you want, but Labour delivered 62% of its members to Remain. A Tory-run campaign that never sent out a positive message because, you know, those “uncultured voters” only react to fear was doomed from the start. Idiots.

Posted on 6/26/16 | 12:33 AM CET

Catherine Lincoln

Interesting that they’re all males, on both sides of the divide.

Posted on 6/27/16 | 7:33 PM CET

Catherine Lincoln

See my p;revious post: all males except Angela Merkel.

Posted on 6/27/16 | 7:34 PM CET

Alboy

RUPERT MURDOCH – TOP OF THE LIST…

Posted on 6/27/16 | 11:32 PM CET

me

@Catherine Lincoln

I always tire of woman making everything about woman. Why was it all males? Where was Theresa May et. al. in this campaign. Now it’s all over you can’t shut the woman up with their tutting.

Can you imagine Thatcher sitting on the side-lines for whichever side she believed in. That’s why it’s all men the woman were too weak.

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